by Gavin Smith
‘Sorry,’ came the cheerfully unrepentant-sounding voice of Rivid.
‘Look,’ Pagan began. ‘We risk everything if we go there. Let’s just go and finish our project,’ he said, meaning God.
‘You think Russia will be any safer?’ I asked. ‘Like you say, everything’s for sale. They’ll be able to outbid what you pay for privacy, and you know it. Also, the Russian authorities, criminal or not, will cooperate with the people who are looking for us in a way that Balor’s lot won’t.’ Morag shivered at the sound of Balor’s name. Like most people her age, she knew Balor’s reputation as a criminal bogeyman. A cyborg transformed to look like some mythical sea monster that ran his pirate kingdom from within the ruins of New York City.
Pagan and I knew more. Balor had been special forces, SBS. He may even have served under Rolleston.
Some soldiers, most of them originally street punks, had themselves altered to look like monsters. There were entire units made up of werewolves, goblins, even things from old medias like the Klingz. Often it wasn’t just cosmetic alterations. A werewolf would have his olfactory senses enhanced, claws, fangs, etc. Needless to say, while this sort of stuff may be useful on the streets it had been pointless in the war. In squaddie circles people doing this were thought to be trying too hard and considered something of a joke. They rarely made it into any special forces. Balor and his crew were the exception. He didn’t give a shit what people thought of him. He just wanted to be different. He did not want to be human. He wanted to be the sea.
Balor spent most of his operational existence fighting on Proxima Centauri, deep in the cold dead oceans of a cold dead planet. He had been extensively rebuilt for submarine operations at incredible depths. Pretty much most of his body had been replaced. At the same time he had his body sculpted to resemble some primordial sea demon from mythology. The body sculpt had been so good that it gave me pause the one time I’d seen him. There seemed to be nothing human about him: it was as though he was as alien as one of Them. There also was a rumour that he’d undergone neurosurgery to change his thought patterns into something that was no longer human.
And then there was the eye. While it may have been an affectation, a reference to obscure ancient mythology, there were more damn rumours about that eye than there were about Them. An experimental weapon, self-mutilation, Themtech, even some particularly unpleasant sexual practices involving eye sockets were suggested, though probably not within his earshot.
Balor had been a senior NCO, I forget what rank. His outfit was called the Fomorians. The majority of them had been navy divers and not Royal Marines like most of the SBS and they loved Balor. He commanded their total loyalty. Most of them were transformed for deep ops and most of them also had themselves sculpted to look like sea monsters.
Again it was only rumour, but apparently he stopped listening to the officers and started making up his own missions. Command became worried first and then scared about their inability to control Balor and his people. He was asked to leave the service. The Fomorians went with him and nobody tried to stop them. They disappeared.
That was ten years ago. Three years later they turned up again. They were at the head of a coalition of maritime-based criminals and veterans chosen from various navies and maritime special forces. Units like the SBS, Navy Seals, Italy’s San Marco Marines, the US Marines Maritime Special Purpose Force and Russia’s Naval Spetznaz. They took over the ruins of New York, pushing out the existing gangs and nearly feral tribespeople, who had lived in the city since it had been evacuated in the wake of rising waters. They fortified the partially submerged city, turning it into a maze-like death trap for any who entered without their permission. Under Balor’s control it became a free port, a base for piracy, smuggling and just about every other criminal enterprise imaginable.
There had been a few half-hearted attempts by the American government to retake the city, but in the end it proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Again rumour had it that the American government cut a deal with Balor. They rerouted what shipping they could and paid protection money for what shipping they couldn’t, like everyone else, and learned to tolerate the self-styled pirate king of New York.
See, that was the problem when talking about Balor; he based himself on myth and all anyone really knew about him was rumour. However, by far and away the scariest rumour that I had ever heard about him was that he had been the Grey Lady’s lover. For some reason I found that more worrying than the atrocities, the general weirdness and his ability to scare governments.
‘You ever meet him?’ I asked Pagan.
‘Balor? No. You?’ he said, still not looking happy.
‘Saw him once. He was coming back, I think for the last time. I was shipping out to Sirius for the first time. I saw some really hard men and women get out of his way.’ I thought for a while about the eight-foot-tall monster I’d seen in the disembarkation lounge of the Kenyan Spoke. It still sent a shiver down my spine. I looked at Morag’s concerned expression. I don’t think the two ex-special forces operators accompanying her were being particularly reassuring.
‘Still,’ I said. ‘We won’t be having anything to do with Balor himself. We’ll just keep our heads down, find Mudge and then decide what to do.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Pagan said. ‘Morag, what do you think?’ Morag looked surprised that she was being asked her opinion. She thought about it for a while.
‘I think the program’s the most important thing,’ she finally said.
‘The God thing? You serious?’ I said, surprised.
‘Do you think this Mudge can help?’ she asked me.
‘Help what? You guys find God? Not really.’ I was beginning to lose a point of reference for the conversation.
‘Maybe we should go to Russia then.’ She sounded unsure of herself.
‘Look, you guys do what you want. I’ll make my own way to New York and find Mudge myself. Besides, I think New York is the one place that Rolleston may have some problems killing me,’ I told them. I was pissed off for no good reason I could think of. Morag looked away from me and an awkward silence followed.
‘I’m going with Jakob,’ she suddenly announced. Pagan looked between the two of us. It was obvious that he was not happy with her decision.
‘Well I guess we’re going to New York,’ he said.
Hot LZ. I could hear Buck’s guitar solo accompanied by the near-constant whining rhythm of the gunship’s six slaved minigun turrets. It seemed strangely calm as my audio dampeners kicked in, taking out the worst of the noise, and I watched the tracer light display fill the air with disinterest.
Beneath us was a plain of mud, bodies and the wreckage of various armoured vehicles, all ours. Even in the gunship I could feel a warm wind blowing across it. We debussed almost looking like a military unit as we rolled into the trench network. Training, common sense and experience pushed through a haze of drugs and fatigue, telling us where the best places to hide and point guns were as we found overlapping defensive positions.
I became vaguely aware of taking light fire from the moment we landed. I barely noticed the gunship take off, peripherally aware of vectored air pushing down on me as it climbed away from us. We leapfrogged from covering position to covering position. We did everything we could to avoid contact as we were right in the middle of Their push, and more importantly we really couldn’t be bothered to fight. Not that They were trying too hard to find us.
Their mechanised push was going on above our heads. Every time one of Their heavy troop-carrying tanks went over, the honeycombed energy matrices glowing blue, we would take cover, bury ourselves in mud or simply remain still. All we really had to worry about were Their Walkers and any loose Berserks. There were relatively few of both as this was mainly an artillery, air and armoured battle, or more accurately a rout.
The sky was infrequently lit by Their energy beams and black light. Our return fire - plasma, various HE rounds and missiles - was even further away and more infrequent
. Every so often a flight of Their fighters would scream overhead, coming back from a distant massacre.
I was lying on my back all but submerged in the mud, watching the underside of one of Their heavy tanks float overhead, admiring, not for the first time, the beauty of the energy matrices. It seemed to take a while for me to register the events around me as dangerous and then quantify them further as incoming enemy fire, though it was probably a lot faster than it felt. Wired reflexes and nerves, along with slaughter, warred with near-total physical exhaustion to create this bizarre, twilight half-world in which I seemed to exist.
One of Their Walkers, ten feet of organic mech, had one foot in the trench we were living in for that moment. Power-assisted, liquid-looking tentacles reached out for David Brownsword, the quiet Scouser who was running point for us. Brownie made life difficult for everyone by dropping a multi-spectrum smoke and ECM charge from his pack before making a sprint straight for us.
Split-screen visual info from the rest of the squad told me that there were Berserks entering the trench, debussed from a heavy tank behind us. I didn’t bother with orders. They knew what they were doing. My shoulder laser tore through the easy-release clips on the inertial armour at my shoulder. The beam stabbed out superfluously at the Walker but acted along with my smartlink to form a lock for one of my pack missiles before Brownie’s grenade took full effect.
I turned away from the Walker in front of me and brought the HdK SAW up to fire through my squad at the enemy infantry coming from behind us. The light, high-explosive, anti-tank missile launched itself from one of the twin tubes on my pack. I was barely aware of the heat as its rocket engine kicked in ten feet above me.
Bone-like biological penetrator rounds filled the trench from the Walker’s shard cannons. Multiple hits against my solid-state breastplate and helmet flung me to the ground. One round even beat the hardening inertial armour undersuit and embedded itself in my cybernetic arm.
From prone I pushed myself into a firing position and continued firing through the squad using the SAW’s smartlink to target the enemy infantry flanking us in the trench. They were Berserks. Hunched, hulking, four-armed, vaguely humanoid forms made of chitin and black liquid. Each of the aliens’ four limbs ended in some kind of weapon attachment. With something approaching disinterest, I began placing bursts of armour-piercing, hydro-shock rounds into them, each burst getting a little push from the gauss booster on the end of the barrel, sending the bullets deeper into the supersonic.
Behind me the HEAT warhead’s explosion shook the ground and sprayed mud everywhere. I had no idea if my missile had hit, been confused by Brownie’s ECM or been taken out by the Walker’s black light anti-missile defence.
Overhead my audio dampeners compensated for one long hypersonic boom as both Gregor and Bibs began firing overlapping long bursts from their railguns, aiming by dead reckoning where they thought the Walker was, their optics confused by the multi-spectrum smoke.
Brownie slid into the mud next to me, sending a grenade perilously close to the railgunners to impact at the back of the advancing squad of Berserks. He swore as his grenade launcher jammed. As he tried to work the pump he was suddenly wrenched off the ground. I felt warm wetness rain down on me as the Walker’s tentacles tore Brownie apart in mid-air. Where was my adrenaline? Can you wear out the glands?
I rolled over, triggering the microwave emitter on top of my SAW, as the Walker bore down on me. It had the weird, warped, off-centre look to it They get when they’re injured. The minor millisecond pause the microwave emitter gave me was enough as I triggered the rest of the SAW’s magazine into it at point-blank range, probably not doing a great deal of harm. However, it was staggering as hypersonic round after hypersonic round impacted into it. Gregor advanced until he stood between it and me. The Walker finally toppled over, beginning its rapid sludge-like dissolution to join the local mud. I barely registered that there was a red mess from a shard round where Bib s face used to be. I walked past her as she slid to the ground. Now They would want us, now They knew we were here.
I ejected the spent cassette from my SAW and replaced it with another vacuum-packed two hundred rounds. It didn’t matter that Bibby Sterlinin was dead. It didn’t matter that the sum of the experiences that went to form her existence as a sentient being was over. It didn’t matter that the thrill-seeking corporate brat who could‘ve easily joined the Fortunate Sons or dodged the war altogether had been my friend and even on one very drunk occasion my lover. What mattered was we needed her ammunition.
‘Get her ammo.’ I said to no one in particular. If we’d had the time we would’ve stripped her of ware as per our standing orders. At least with the planet being evacuated the Carrion units wouldn‘t get to her and harvest her body for implants.
It hadn’t even felt like sleep. More like a broken machine running down, but the dreams had come anyway. I’d woken up alert, aware of the sled’s high-pitched whine. The internal clock in my head was at least working. I’d been asleep for just under eight hours. I couldn’t risk using my internal GPS in case its signal was traced, but that had to put us close to New York. I knew I was going to have to find a cyber doc.
I looked around the cargo hold. It smelt pretty ripe now. Especially as we hadn’t had time to clean up after the attack on the Avenues, and in my case I’d been dumped in what I could only assume by the smell was raw sewage.
Morag was asleep. Pagan was in a net trance, presumably working on his God program. I tried not to watch Morag sleep.
‘Rivid,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes, my friend?’ His amplified voice boomed out. Morag stirred.
‘I miss the Faroes?’ I asked.
‘Yes, we got fuel there, we didn’t stay long. You were very tired, I think.’ Even through the cheap Russian amplifier he sounded distracted. Morag was awake and bleary-eyed.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked him.
‘I am not sure,’ he said.
‘Whass going on?’ Morag asked sleepily.
‘I’ve been tracking something, a big signal currently twenty or so miles to our north. I detected it a while back and didn’t think anything of it, but it has changed its course to an intercept with us.’
‘Will it?’ I asked.
‘No, too large, too slow.’
‘Morag, can you link to Pagan and tell him we need him out here? What is it?’ I asked Rivid.
‘Not sure.’ The jolly Russian was gone; there was only concentration in his tone now. ‘The signal’s confused. They’re either trying to jam or it has stealth capability, sub-surface though.’ I didn’t like the sound of this. The capabilities involved were beginning to sound very military.
‘Could you—’
‘Multiple incoming! Secure for manoeuvres!’ the tinny amp suddenly screamed at us. We banked so suddenly I could have sworn I felt us touch the waters of the Atlantic. I heard servos whine as they struggled to open the hatches for the weapons pods.
‘Can we help?’ I shouted at Rivid.
‘Pagan, they are attempting to hack into my systems. I need you on comms!’ Rivid shouted. Pagan was still in his trance. I turned to Morag to find out why she hadn’t contacted him.
‘It’s all right. He knows and he’s on it. I’m going to help,’ she said, anticipating my question. Suddenly the bulkheads came to life. They were papered with a kind of thin viz screen. I could see various images from the cameras around the sled as well as sensor data. Heading towards us from the north were the contrails of two missiles. I’m not sure that witnessing the attack was doing my sense of helplessness any good.
‘Do you want me to jack into the weapons?’ I shouted over the sled’s screaming engines as we suddenly banked hard again. My only answer was a tirade of badly distorted Russian. I watched as beams of harsh red light from the sled’s laser anti-missile defences bisected the sky. It looked like a nearly constant grid of light as the missiles threw themselves into a series of defensive manoeuvres to avoid the lasers.
‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Rivid’s tinny-sounding voice screamed. Mid-spin I was vaguely aware of him launching several surface-to-surface missiles of his own. I knew he’d link to Pagan and have him provide electronic cover for them, jam our unseen enemy’s countermeasures so the missiles would have a chance of hitting.
The problem now was the second missile. Even if the laser or the chaff and decoys that Rivid was now firing off brought the missile down it was too close and would probably still destroy us.
‘Three, no four, craft have been launched. Copters by the look of it. Making heavy burn for us,’ Rivid said. I didn’t see what he was worried about. Surely the missile was the more pressing concern. I could see on the bulkhead screens the missile coming towards us and on the sensor display the four incoming copters. Judging by their speed their rotors were stowed and they were just using jets.
Then the missile just dropped into the ocean. A moment later there was an explosion but the water dampened much of the force. I felt the sled rise and buck violently from the underwater blast but Rivid rode it through.
‘Nice one, Pagan,’ I muttered to myself. Hacking a missile in flight was more than a little impressive.
